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Food Chain Radio Show #1156
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
Bees and Pollinators in the Mine!
Guest: Thor Hanson, Author, Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees
About that canary in the cage…
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Bees and Pollinators: Bees are the Canaries in the Mine of Our Environment.
There was a time when hard-rock miners carried caged canaries down into their mines as a safeguard against invisible accumulations of methane and carbon monoxide gases.
Canaries are very sensitive critters, much more sensitive than hard rock miners. And so when the toxic gasses did begin to accumulate, way down there in the deep dark mine, the poor little canary would die.
Seeing the poor little bird dead in its cage, the miners could escape back to the surface before the accumulation of gases became so great it would kill them. And so the canary in the cage became a metaphor for an advanced warning of danger.
Another advanced warning of danger is the bee, which, like the canary, is very sensitive to environmental toxicities.
But the bee also serves another purpose: You see, the bee is our miner of the environment, and by its mining of pollen, brings to us one out of every three bites of food we eat.
In a very real sense, as goes the bee, so go we. And so today we pause to ask:
Leave a comment below: Is the bee thriving or dying?
Nationally syndicated Food Chain Radio airs live Saturday mornings 9-10AM Pacific.
